Hidden horrors…Zarrar Khuhro
IMAGINE that your life ended before it even truly began. Imagine that the first bed you were laid in was not some cosy nook in your parents home but a garbage heap strewn with refuse and filth. Imagine that the first touch you felt was not the loving caress of a mother but the clawed paw of an animal looking for its next meal.
This is the fate of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of newborns that are abandoned across Pakistan every year; you might even have walked past such a site of horror without even knowing that a new life was taking its last breath just a few feet away, or that a beautiful baby that should be warm and alive was instead growing cold and stiff.
Some lucky few survive; in September last year in the Chatha Bakhtawar area of Islamabad locals found a newborn baby girl inside a red paper bag in a garbage dump. They alerted the Islamabad Police who promptly took the girl to a local hospital, thus saving a life intended for death. One of the rescue team members, constable Muhammad Arif, was childless and has now filed to adopt the little girl.
In February this year, another baby girl was rescued, but not from a garbage dump this time. This innocent baby had been buried alive in a Nowshera graveyard like something out of a tale of pre-Islamic Arabia. She may also now find a home as Major Waqas of the Pakistan Army heard about the case and has filed for adoption.
But most abandoned babies are not as lucky. Case in point: earlier this month the bodies of five newborns were recovered from garbage heaps across Narowal over a period of just 15 days. Most of them had been mauled and mutilated by dogs and cats. Like the two who were rescued, all of these voiceless victims were girls.
A staggering 95pc of abandoned babies are female.
Does that mean that the majority of abandoned newborns are girls or are we drawing the wrong conclusions based on the few examples that have been mentioned?
I spoke with Shabana Edhi, the wife of Faisal Edhi who took over the care of orphans and abandoned children after the passing of Bilquis Edhi. Bilquis Edhi had, in the 1970s, launched the initiative of placing cradles outside Edhi centres in an effort to provide a humane alternative for those who would otherwise have abandoned their babies. That initiative continues to this date, but unfortunately, according to Shabana, very few actually now avail it. She confirms that, yes, the vast majority a staggering 95 per cent of abandoned babies are in fact female. Male children are abandoned too, she says, but she also tells us that most male children disposed of in this way are either physically or mentally disabled.
These facts mitigate against the common belief that these are mostly children born out of wedlock and thus abandoned by their parents. The massive gender disparity here can lead to only one conclusion: that these were girl children abandoned simply because the parents were unable or, more likely, unwilling to raise a daughter.
People get ultrasounds in the fifth or sixth month or so, and once they realise they are about to have a girl, they start planning to abandon her. Poverty plays as much of a role as entrenched gender biases and beliefs, says Shabana, who believes that many of these people already have several children that they cannot care for, and consider the birth of a, or another, girl to be something they simply cannot afford.
But none of this justifies murder, and make no mistake, leaving a child to die in a garbage heap is murder. And every year, 250 to 300 such tiny victims are found across Karachi alone you can only imagine what the total for the entire country is. In fact, the truly disturbing trend is that Shabana tells us that in recent years the number of babies found alive can be counted on the fingers of one hand. So dire is the situation that the Edhi Foundation has stopped entertaining applications for adoption, simply because there are no children to adopt.
This is also because once they realise they are having a girl, these parents (I use the term in a strictly biological sense) opt to induce early pregnancies with the aid of shady doctors and midwives. Some of these midwives, we are told, take extra money from the parents to dispose of the unwanted child themselves. The child thus prematurely born has a near zero chance of survival, exactly as those who brought it into this world intended. Had they any love or even an iota of humanity in them they would simply have left the children at an Edhi centre. But dumping these babies like trash, or going so far as to bury them alive clearly shows that the intention is to kill.
Courtesy Dawn